Work Text:
And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed
and every morning revealed new miracles.
Yoongi is perched up on a rise, stopped for water and a heading check, when he spies the dust cloud blooming in the distance. He fumbles for his binoculars but only catches the rear bumper of a sun-baked skiff before the craft sweeps around the mountains and out of sight, leaving dust sifting down in its wake. He lowers the binoculars and taps the comm in his ear.
“Scout Min, Sector B approach,” he calls in. “Comms check. Over.”
It’s a minute before the comm chirps in response. The voice on the other end is as familiar as it is unexpected.
“Tower reads. Signal is good.”
Yoongi frowns. “Jimin? Where’s Namjoon?”
It had been Namjoon in the chair when he’d left, wishing him good luck and happy hunting and laughing when Yoongi told him where he could shove his luck. Jimin’s supposed to be off today. The entire reason Yoongi is out here right now is that Jimin is supposed to be off today.
After their argument this morning, the last thing he wants is Jimin’s voice in his ear.
“Out,” comes Jimin’s reply, staticky and brusque.
No shit. Yoongi glances in the direction of the settling dust cloud, mood souring. “Was that him just now?”
Jimin goes quiet, probably checking the tracking log. The relay tower blinks red in the distance, the only thing for miles, a lone marker of the last bastion of civilization tucked away beneath the earth.
“What was the heading?”
“West. Past the mountains.”
“Uh, affirmative. Tae picked something up on the scanners. They went to check it out.”
And left Jimin to run comms. Great. So much for getting some fucking distance.
“More dust, probably,” he scowls, shoving his water flask back into his bag. Jimin makes a noise in response—some kind of disapproval, maybe. It’s hard to tell over the comm, but it’s usually disapproval. Yoongi just assumes, these days.
“A little hope wouldn’t kill you, you know.”
Yoongi snorts, hoisting his bag higher, and doesn’t bother with a response. His silence speaks as well as it always has.
“Yoongi,” says Jimin. His disappointment reads loud and clear despite the choppy connection.
Yoongi sets his jaw. At least one of them should be professional about this. He’s definitely going to have words with Namjoon about abandoning his post to chase shadows on the scanners once he gets back to base.
“What’s my heading?”
For a moment, he thinks Jimin might push. Yoongi almost hopes he does—all the things he hadn’t said this morning bubble frustrated and caustic under his tongue. But apparently Jimin’s not in the mood.
“South twelve degrees. Quadrant B-21. Heading confirmed and approved.”
“Great,” he says. “Scout Min, Sector B, proceeding.”
“Copy, proceeding.” The line fuzzes for a moment, then Jimin says, “You’re sure you don’t want backup?”
“What for?” Yoongi’s been doing this since he was old enough for scout training. He knows the mountains and the dustlands better than anyone. Backup would only slow him down.
“Right,” Jimin says, voice small and scathing. “What for.”
Yoongi doesn’t have time for this. He knows what he’s doing; he knows what’s out here. More importantly, he knows what’s not: any promise of life, of hope, of a future. Maybe the world was green once, but that was generations ago. Now there’s only rock and dust and desert.
Jimin doesn’t get it. He hasn’t been out beyond the base. He doesn’t understand that this job isn’t about believing in finding anything—there’s no secret oasis brimming with hidden life waiting for someone to stumble across it, no matter what the scouts and the scientists and the fools running everything say. It’s just that being out here keeps him from wasting away deep in the dark for his whole life. Even the baked, burned surface of the long-dead planet is better than eternity trapped in a bunker.
“If you hear from Joon,” Yoongi says, “tell him good fucking luck.”
When the line crackles to life again, the hiss of static makes him wince.
“Copy,” Jimin says, positively icy. “Tower out.”
Yoongi spares a glance back towards the tower—towards Jimin, towards home—then returns his attention to the craggy bulk of the southern mountains. It’s a long trek to B quadrant, and the sun is rising swiftly. He sighs, adjusts his respirator, and kicks his skiff into gear, buzzing towards the scorched, dead peaks.
He has to abandon the skiff eventually. It’s not graded for high elevation, and the motor starts to cough and choke as the path gets steeper. He leaves it in the lee of a boulder and continues on foot.
Jimin pings him when he’s most of the way up the climb, a chime and crackle in his ear.
“Tower to Scout Min.” His voice is carefully polite. Yoongi distantly wonders what he’s been up to in the hours since his last check in. If he’s heard back from Namjoon and Taehyung. If they’ve reported back their inevitable disappointment. “Progress check?”
“Progress nominal,” Yoongi says, maybe a little short of breath. It’s a steep climb. “Signal is good.”
“Copy.”
The silence that follows should be a relief. It usually is. But he’s bad at leaving things be when it comes to Jimin, which is at least half the reason he’s in this mess to begin with.
The path levels out eventually, and Yoongi pauses, perched high above the plains below. The world is almost a marvel from so high up. Even the endless spread of dust and the churn of the northern sandstorms don’t seem so miserable from the top of the world. The dustlands spread out ochre and russet, and the mountain crags pierce the hazy sky. There’s the faintest crust of snow capping the highest peaks, a promise that one day it might rain again. Namjoon likes to talk about it with animated hope. Yoongi will believe it when he sees it. He taps the comm again.
“Scout Min to Tower.”
“Tower reads,” says Jimin. “What is it?”
“Don’t be rude.”
“Is there an issue, Scout Min?”
Now he’s just being a dick. Yoongi presses his tongue against his teeth and turns his back on the world and the tiny blinking light of the relay tower, tiny from so high up.
“Just checking in,” he says, pushing forward again. “Any word from Joon?”
A long, stretching silence suggests that yes, there’s been word, and it hasn’t been good. Yoongi grins at the dusty mountain path, but there’s no humor in it, no victory.
“False alarm,” Jimin says stiffly. “They’re on their way back.”
“Too bad.”
Jimin scoffs. “You could pretend to be disappointed.”
“Why would I be disappointed?” Yoongi shoves himself past a boulder, edges of the rock face tugging at his clothes. Whose fucking idea was it to send anyone up this far anyway? “Wasn’t my mistake.”
“So now it’s a mistake.”
Yoongi shrugs, even though there’s no way Jimin can see. The tower vanishes behind him as he pushes deeper into the mountains. “Not sure what else to call it.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jimin says. “Possibility? Hope?”
“Sure.” Yoongi laughs. “Hope.”
“Not everyone is as cynical as you.”
“No,” Yoongi agrees. “Most people are sentimental idiots.”
“If you have something to say, say it.”
Yoongi huffs. What a stupid job, scouring the dead earth in the hopes of finding something living. It’s just—there’s nothing else. There’s nothing anywhere.
“You’ve never been out here,” he says. He’d wanted to say it this morning, but he’d been thinking about this—the eventuality of working together again, once their tempers cooled, once he’d forgotten what a mistake it is to sleep with Park Jimin, to dare to want more. It had been a kindness, really, to hold his tongue. But it’s different when they’re so far apart. It’s harder to remember himself when Jimin is the voice in his ear and not the man in his bed. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Bullshit,” says Jimin. “I’m in the tower right now.”
“Not the same.”
“As you’re so incredibly fond of pointing out.”
“I mean it. There’s nothing out here, Jimin-ah. It’s stupid to assume there could be.”
“Then why do you do it?” Jimin demands. Yoongi can imagine the face he’s making at the dust-smeared windows of the relay tower. He hopes Jimin appreciates that, that he can feel his furious eyes even up in the mountains, all alone. “If you’re so fucking resigned to everything, if it’s not worth it, why bother? Maybe the world is ending, but it’s always ending! Can’t we at least try to live?”
“It’s not that easy,” Yoongi cuts in. Jimin’s laugh drowns out even the whip of the wind.
“You’re so full of shit.”
“Jimin—”
“No! When you’re here you can’t stop talking about being out there, and when you’re out there you’re so fucking bitter about it and I just—! You don’t leave space for anything else. I never know what you want. I never know if it’s the job or the city or me, or—”
He cuts himself off, but it’s too late. It’s already out there. Yoongi’s stomach sinks.
He knew it was a bad idea. He’d known it the first time Jimin caught his eye across the tower yard, and he’d known it double when they’d finally spoken and and he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him for days after, and he’d especially known it when Namjoon’s sharp scout eyes had flicked between them standing a hair’s breadth too close at a briefing and his brow had quirked in a question. Yoongi’s no good at closeness and no good at hope, and Jimin is made entirely of both, so open and eager that Yoongi sometimes lets himself forget the truth: that all he’s good for is the dust and the sun and the scorched, dead earth. Might as well wear himself down with the search if it means these fleeting moments of freedom.
He hadn’t meant to bring that home to Jimin, though. He just doesn’t know what to do in the face of that stubborn belief. Yoongi’s not made for that kind of conviction.
“It’s not you,” he says. It comes out rougher than he’d like. “It’s me.”
Even over the radio, he can make out Jimin’s scoff. “You know, normally when a guy says that, it’s definitely you.”
Yoongi’s mouth pinches. “Can we not have this conversation while I’m working?”
“Not like I can talk to you any other time.”
It’s Yoongi’s turn to scoff. “Really?”
“You don’t exactly make yourself available, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Maybe I’m tired of trying to talk to someone who won’t listen.”
“What are you talking about? My entire goddamn job is listening.”
“You—shit!”
The earth gives way beneath him, and he loses his footing in a rumble of rock and dirt. He has the short, breathless sense of falling, then a bright shock of pain in his shoulder and knee, and then he tips sideways off the edge of consciousness into stark nothing.
“Hyung? Hyung! Yoongi!”
Yoongi jolts and immediately regrets moving when his entire body aches in protest. There’s a voice nearby, and it sounds like Jimin, and it sounds panicked, and it takes him a moment to realise his comm has fallen out. He fumbles for it, slotting the receiver back over his ear and hitting the button.
“Here,” he rasps. “Jimin?”
“Fucking hell,” says Jimin, a little shaky. “What happened?”
“Slipped. Was I out long?”
“For a minute, maybe. Your signal is spotty. Where are you?”
“Sinkhole, I think.” It’s dim around him, sunlight filtering down from a fissure maybe ten or fifteen feet up. He grimaces. There’s no way he’s going to make it up there, especially not given the pain radiating up from his knee. “Might need an evac.”
“Min Yoongi, I swear to God—”
“Wasn’t my fault,” he says, pushing himself to sitting. His shoulder twinges.
“Only you,” Jimin says, panic bright in his voice. Yoongi feels bad for scaring him—almost as bad as he feels for everything else. “Only you would fall into a sinkhole—”
Yoongi snorts, wipes his face as he looks around, and promptly stops listening.
Jimin’s voice fades into a buzz in his ear as he tugs down his respirator. He’d think he was dreaming—or unconscious, or hallucinating, or all three—if it weren’t for the throbbing of his knee. He reaches down to wrap a hand around it, wincing at the fresh wash of pain.
“Scout Min to Tower,” he says, his voice faint and far away even to his own ears.
“—why we can’t have conversations,” Jimin carries on over the comms. He’s really picked up steam. “You’re always off gallivanting—”
Distantly, Yoongi feels a flicker of protest. He doesn’t gallivant. But that’s a trifling thing compared to—
“Tower,” he breaks in. Then, louder, “Jimin. I have a positive ID.”
Jimin’s voice cuts out entirely. Yoongi winces and adjusts his grip on his knee. Fuck but that hurts.
“Tower to Scout Min,” Jimin says, stilted. “Repeat?”
“I have a positive ID,” he says, staring at the cavern stretching out before him. “It’s… Jimin, it’s alive.”
He squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again, but the sight doesn’t change. Filling the cavern, lit by the light spilling through the hole above him, is a blooming, flourishing glade. Bushes of broad, waxy leaves crowd beneath narrow tree trunks, the canopy brushing the stone ceiling overhead. Flowers cluster in bunches along the boughs and climb the walls of the cavern like vining ivy. Everything is dark—all deep greens and blues and purples; Yoongi’s never seen plants like these—but it’s all undeniably alive. A fragile, secret garden growing undisturbed beneath the skin of the world.
“You—what? Where? The sinkhole?”
“Yeah,” Yoongi says, and what a fucking joke it is that after all this time, life has held on just like the rest of them—underground, safe from the sun and the scorch and the sandstorms. He wets his lips and pushes himself to his feet, listing to keep his weight off his bad knee. He takes a few fumbling hops forward out of the blazing sunlight, bracing himself against one of the strange trees. His fingers run over rough, cool bark.
“How?”
“Dunno,” Yoongi says, and he laughs and takes a breath that feels thick and clogged and cracking in his chest. He brushes the bud of a flower with a knuckle, and it shivers petal-soft against his skin. “Gotta ask Joon.”
“Right, yeah. We’re on our way.”
Yoongi frowns, turning toward the sinkhole. “Jimin—”
“Don’t you dare argue with me. I’m coming. Just—” He hesitates, and his voice softens. “Let me. Please.”
Yoongi wets his lips. “Okay.”
“Someone has to run field comms,” he says, like Yoongi still needs convincing, and Yoongi swallows a smile.
“Guess Joon’s gonna be a little distracted.”
“Just a little,” Jimin agrees, and this time when Yoongi laughs it doesn’t feel like his chest is cracking open.
“Hey,” he says, before he can think better of it. Limber branches stretch above him, and up close, he can see tiny white flowers blooming in the depths of purpling bushes. “It’s really not you, you know.”
Jimin goes quiet. Yoongi leans back against the tree, slowly easing himself down to sit. Staring up at the canopy makes him dizzy, so he closes his eyes.
“I just… I can’t stay down there. I’d go crazy.”
“I’m not asking you to,” Jimin says. “Just—” He takes a breath. “Fuck, hyung. You make things so hard sometimes.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“Yeah,” Jimin agrees with a crackling sigh. “Yeah, just… Wait for me? We’ll be there soon.”
“Yeah,” says Yoongi. Not like there’s anything else he can do. “I’ll be here.”
A faint clatter startles him out of an accidental doze, and Yoongi blinks his eyes open to a blot of shadow descending through the open sinkhole. He squints, and the blot resolves itself into Jimin, unclipping himself from his harness as Namjoon starts rappelling in after him. Yoongi watches him pause, taking in the glade. His face is half in shadow, but there’s light enough for Yoongi to see the awe, the relief, the way his fingers press against his mouth—the quiet, speechless wonder of a hope rewarded.
At least, Yoongi thinks, if the world is going to conspire to prove him wrong, it’s for the sake of proving Jimin right.
Then Jimin’s eyes land on him, and his expression transforms into something a hundred times worse. Yoongi looks away.
“If this is where you say you told me so,” he starts. Jimin is there before he can finish, dragging him up into a dusty, squeezing hug.
“Fuck, hyung,” he mumbles. “You’ve gotta be the only man in the world who would find proof of life to avoid defining the relationship.”
Yoongi squeezes him back and laughs.
“Sorry,” he says into Jimin’s shoulder. He smells like sun and sweat and the metallic tang of the dustlands. “I’m sorry, Jimin-ah.”
Jimin takes a breath, swelling against Yoongi’s chest, and pulls back. It’s strange to see him out here. There’s dust in his clothes and his hair and he looks so fucking good, even frowning and furious and maybe a little relieved.
“You,” he says, and he smacks Yoongi’s arm—gently, though. ”You’re so—”
“Sorry,” Yoongi tells him again.
“I’m not asking you to stay,” he says. “Just… come back in between. I want this to work. I want you to want this to work.”
“I know,” says Yoongi, because he does. And then, “I do,” because that’s the whole damn problem. “Sorry. I’m bad at this.”
“Relationships?”
“Hope.”
Jimin takes a breath. “Can’t you try? For me?”
Yoongi swallows. His shoulder hurts and his knee hurts and the world is green and growing around him, clinging stubbornly to life. How can he refuse to do the same?
“Yeah,” he says, reaching for Jimin’s hand. Jimin gives it easily, and Yoongi holds on tight. “Yeah, I’ll try.”